This cake right here? It’s amazing. I mean, it knocked the Momofuku Birthday Cake right out of the #1 spot, and that was a damn good cake.

This Chocolate Mocha Cake is seriously. SO. GOOD.

Rich dark chocolate cake and a silky Mocha Swiss Meringue buttercream, topped with a dreamy chocolate ganache. Does it get any better? I don’t think so.

If you’ve been following Liv for Cake for a while, you know this is one of my oldest (and one of my favorite) recipes. If you haven’t tried it, you NEED to. You will not regret it.

The frosting is my favorite thing ever — you’ll be eating that with a spoon and thanking me later.

How to Make This Mocha Cake

For the cake layers, I used my very favorite Chocolate Cake recipe modified slightly for the 6″ pans and I used hot coffee instead of hot water in the cake batter. You can’t really taste the coffee, maybe only slightly, but it does help the chocolate flavor stand out.

I like to use Dutch-process cocoa powder as it’s richer in flavor, but any regular cocoa powder will work just fine.

Mocha Buttercream

THIS, people, is honestly the best thing you’ll ever eat. Silky Swiss meringue buttercream with espresso and chocolate. It is pure heaven!

The recipe calls for instant espresso powder (not granules). This is a very fine powder and should dissolve perfectly into the buttercream. Some people were having the issue of flecks of espresso powder in their buttercream because it didn’t dissolve fully. This may be due to the brand of espresso powder used. This is the brand I use and it works really well. However, I’ve updated the recipe to include dissolving the espresso powder first in 1 tsp of hot water. It’s optional though.

Can I Use Regular Espresso Or Regular Coffee?

No, you must use instant coffee that dissolves completely in water. You could use regular instant coffee vs instant espresso powder, but you’d want to make it quite strong to match the flavor. I haven’t experimented with this myself, but it would really be totally fine. You can add more or less to your liking.

How to Do a Drip Cake

I kept the cake decorating simple, as I wanted to do the drippy ganache technique. It’s surprisingly easy (I swear!), the key thing is to get your ganache to the right consistency which may require some trial and error.

Step #1 is to frost the cake evenly and smooth the sides and top. This is probably the most time-intensive part if you want to get it perfect (which, obviously, I do).

I used a small offset spatula to frost the cake and then a bench scraper to smooth it all out. This part took the most time.

Once I got the top and sides mostly perfect, I popped the whole thing in the fridge and made the ganache.

This Swiss meringue buttercream gets very firm in the fridge (like butter does), so you’ll want to leave the cake out for a couple of hours before serving so that it can soften up.

More Coffee Flavored Cake Recipes

This Chocolate Mocha Cake is insanely good. Like, ridiculous. It is my all-time favorite cake! You will not be disappointed with this cake. I promise!

Notes & Tips for This Chocolate Mocha Cake

• The recipe as-is will also work in two 8″ pans. For three 8″ pans, 1.5x the recipe.
• To make cupcakes, all you need to do is reduce the baking time — start checking at 15 mins or so.
• You can use regular cocoa powder if you don’t have Dutch-process.
• For the frosting, the coffee you use must be instant. See the post for more details.
• To help ensure your cake layers bake up nice and flat, check out my How to Bake Flat Cake Layers post!

Mocha Cake Ingredients

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Mocha Cake Instructions

Instructions: